Coffee-Table Notes

The Studio, Edinburgh Three stars   If property is theft, there are few better illustrations of legitimised greed in action than a good game of Monopoly. As otherwise unassuming friends and family cosplay ruthless toy town billionaires on the backs of their nearest and dearest who land on their ever expanding empires, there is a wannabe landlord, it seems, within us all.    Beyond the game itself, there is a tale to tell of the real life rip-off merchant who stole a once egalitarian idea and took it to the highest bidder. This is the story shown off here in Jordan & Skinner’s playful pop culture history lesson, in which we learn how early twentieth century free thinking games designer and political activist Lizzie Magie devised what she called The Landlord’s Game. This was to be an educational tool to explain the progressive economic ideas of economist Henry George and the perils of monopolisation. When fellow games designer Charles Darrow stumbled on Magie’s creation...

Òran Mór, Glasgow        Five stars    When a young woman turns up on the steps of the Brussels courthouse intent on putting the state on trial for crimes against women, the odds of victory look hopeless. The woman’s name is Lune, and as her determination makes clear as she sets herself in for the long haul, she isn’t going anywhere.    We are initially told this retrospectively in Belgian writer Pamela Ghislain’s play by Gabriel, the high flying alpha male lawyer who took on her case pro bono. As Lune comes up against the system in the form of the court’s initially officious administrator Darya, her refusal to budge from the steps turns her into a cause celebre. She also becomes a target for the sort of male violence she quietly rails against. This is something the play’s harrowing central monologue in Katherine Mendelsohn’s forensically clear translation makes agonisingly clear.   Wils Wilson’s searing production for A Play, a Pie and a Pin...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars    There has already been one stage play and a major documentary in the last six months about what happened on Kenmure Street on Glasgow’s South Side one sunny day in 2021. That was when UK Home Office officials attempted to remove two men from their homes.    Presumably these tactics would have seen the men detained and ultimately deported, never to set foot on Glasgow soil again. History, on the other hand, had other plans. As we know, a spontaneous show of strength that began on the men’s doorstep ended with an entire community standing up to protect its own.    Katharine Williams’s new play for RUPTURE Theatre Company and Company of Wolves tells all this through the words and actions of three performers who become a kind of Greek chorus of locals bearing witness. They do this in-between being on the frontline of the action, be it as protestors, policemen, or the woman watching from her window who finally c...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh  Four stars   As any armchair radical knows, if you can’t dance to the everyday insurrection you’re at the vanguard of, it’s not a real revolution at all. This grade A manifesto is taken to the max in Kate Prince’s smash hit musical based around the figure of Sylvia Pankhurst, the real life suffragette who campaigned in the UK during the early years of the twentieth century for votes for women. As the daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who might be regarded as one of the mothers of the women’s movement, Sylvia is a chip off the old block. Later, alas, she finds herself at odds with her family for not taking a by any means necessary approach to her activism, but gets the vote anyway.    If all that sounds rather dry, think again. With music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde to go with Prince’s lyrics and a book penned with Priya Parmar, this is history told in the form of a non-stop mash up of hip hop, soul, funk and gos...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   If a working class hero is something to be, then why does so much theatre still sideline the so-called lower orders as servants, sidekicks or light relief doing the dirty work or else playing the donkey for their masters and mistresses ad nauseam? While lead stage roles are left to the posh boys and girls, the common people remain cast as criminals and crooks.   Or maybe that was just William Shakespeare, who gets caught bang to rights in Martin O’Connor’s ingenious peek behind the curtain in A Play, a Pie and a Pint's latest edition of lunchtime theatre. Here we find A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Rude Mechanical and wannabe thespian Nick Bottom, who seems condemned to play the fool forever.    Debbie Hannan’s production begins with Bottom the jobbing actor auditioning for the play within a play that features in Shakespeare’s play when Bottom gets to live the high life for a while. By turns nervous, apologetic and desperate to impres...

The Studio, Edinburgh Four stars   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but when an out of work actor is approached by a mysterious stranger to role play some dark past in Tim Foley’s play, the experience awakens subterranean forces that rise from the grave in a terrifying display of nocturnal psychic terrorism.    No, this ingenious bite size production by the Wigan based ThickSkin company isn’t a reboot of The Woman in Black or any of the other hammy horrors doing the rounds over the last few years. Rather, Neil Bettles’ production of Foley’s late night yarn is an altogether more up to date take on supernaturally inclined pulp fiction.   Our host Joe wears baggy jeans and works in a bar to make ends meet. His posh boy ex represents everything Joe hates in the cliquey theatre scene, so when even posher local David hires Joe to pretend to be a ghost to scare David’s nieces holed up in his country pile, it looks like a pretty lucrative gig. Once Joe gets on site, ...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    A school reunion opens the National Theatre of Scotland’s suitably monumental looking twenty-first century reboot of Muriel Spark’s classic novel. Beside a semi circular coliseum style staircase that dominates the stage, a grown up Sandy Stranger and her less likely peers from the girl gang once known as the Brodie Set rewind on their between the wars adolescence that shaped them. This, as we know, was down largely to the mercurial figure of Jean Brodie, the self mythologizing libertine whose every inspirational utterance in David Harrower’s simmering new adaptation sounds like a victory speech.   Gayle Rankin’s chic and sensual Brodie first appears striding down the steps of Chloe Lamford’s epic set looking part Hollywood diva, part demagogue. Her students follow, initially looking more St. Trinian’s than Edinburgh’s Marcia Blaine School for Girls. This is a fleeting pre-cursor in Vicky Featherstone’s production for when they...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow  Four stars    The world has been turned upside down a million times over since Ayub Khan Din’s tragicomic portrait of multi racial back street Britain caught some kind of zeitgeist three decades ago. The play was successful enough to be turned into a hit film three years later. Both showed off what at the time was a milieu rarely seen on stage. Set in 1971 Salford, Khan Din’s study of chip shop owning Pakistani Muslim, George, his English Catholic wife Ella, and their noisy brood of British born mixed race children tapped into a volatile melting pot of cross cultural, pan generational family life.     Half a century on from the play’s post 1960s setting, this new production comes with several lifetimes of cultural baggage in tow. Kash Arshad’s revival - a co-production between  the Citizens, Bolton Octagon and Wiltshire Creative in association with Derby Theatre - stays true to the play’s roots in a bright, funny an...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars Mothers and sons can be a toxic mix. So it goes in Jonny Donahoe’s emotionally charged new play, which will hopefully have a longer life beyond its lunchtime slot as part of A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest season and its subsequent Edinburgh and Paisley dates.    When Mark Barrett’s presumably sole son and heir of Blythe Duff’s solitary matriarch turns up unannounced for the first time in eight months, he finds her burning her back pages on a garden bonfire. Given that some of those pages may involve him, this very Zen gesture of purging has an even greater if largely unspoken resonance. Given that the son’s arrival is because he has something to say to help find some kind of impasse beyond their estrangement, this is even more problematic. As the pair attempt to navigate their way around their differences over the next hour in what looks like an extended co-counselling session, some kind of bridges are eventually built.    As Duff and ...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four Stars   Showbiz secrets didn’t come much glitzier than those of Liberace, the piano playing artist christened Władziu Valentino, who dropped his first names and became a superstar. As the young writer who greets us at the start of Martin Sherman’s new play also makes clear, as far as he is concerned, Liberace’s refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality throughout his life was a betrayal of all those who were out and proud. His successful 1959 court victory over the Daily Mirror’s allusions to his sexuality is key to the writer’s contempt. Liberace’s death in 1987 from causes of AIDS with his gayness still unacknowledged fuels the writer’s ire even more.   As if accidentally summoning a genie, the writer’s angry ruminations about having to write about someone he hates prompts Liberace to swoop in from the heavens and grandstand his way into his affections. What follows in this production co directed by Pitlochry Festival Theatre artistic...

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Five stars   The Club of the Unloved is already in full swing as the audience enter for this touring revival of Emma Rice’s twenty-first century reboot of the mediaeval love story that refuses to lie down. As Les Baxter’s lush lounge core sounds are swapped for Wagner on the vintage record player at the side of the stage, the mini mob of geeky ‘love spotters’ and the live junkyard band above them usher in a romp of all romps that turns to tragedy within a broken heartbeat.    In short, when John Leader’s French speaking knight has a dangerous liaison with Nandi Bhebe’s Irish princess Yseult after fetching her for Edward Rowe’s good King Mark following an altercation with her country's comedy gangster invaders, a heady brew of emotions burst forth. The ill fated pair cavort gymnastically throughout choreographer Etta Murfitt’s routines on a circular stage in Bill Mitchell’s original set design. Refreshed by Vicki Mortimer for this latest iteration...

Òran Mór, Glasgow  Three stars   When the Reverend John Home’s play, Douglas, first appeared in 1757, its romantic verse drama was a sensation. Arriving at the vanguard of the Scottish Enlightenment, Home’s play was hailed as the future by those hanging on to its commercial coat tails, while at the same time outraging those who saw any theatre at all as the Devil’s work.    Probably Douglas’s greatest gift to popular culture is the phrase called out by a fired-up audience member that gives Brian Logan’s new play its title. Several centuries on, history has largely forgotten Home’s opus, with the last professional Scottish production dating back to 1989, when Robert David MacDonald directed it at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.    This is a useful marker for Logan’s back stage romp, which charts Douglas’s irresistible rise through the eyes of Home, his play’s champions who think they are about to hit the big time, and the naysayers who effectively had him chucke...

Perth Theatre Four stars   The writing is on the wall for Alanah, the sparky young woman in Matthew McVarish’s solo play, receiving its first revival since it was seen in 2012. Alanah is living the high life after a fashion, that fashion being in a twenty-storey tower block  in a concrete jungle where she moved when her husband dumped her after just three months of wedded bliss.    That was after Alanah dropped out of uni and pretty much everything else besides to make someone else’s dreams come true. Now she’s chief bridesmaid for her neurotic best mate Zoe’s forthcoming nuptials while holding down a job in the family planning drop in centre. Other people’s private lives, it seems, are demanding her attention at the expense of anything resembling a life of her own.     Just to cap things off, some would-be street poet has started graffitiing bon mots on the wall next to the lift. The fact that she can trace each phrase back to things said to her ...

The Pavilion, Glasgow Four stars   Once upon a time, history books were full of heroes, who helped sex up the humdrum realpolitik of what actually happened enough to bring it off the page and into the hearts and minds of those who might be led to take sides. So it goes with the much lauded story of William Wallace, Scottish knight, scourge of English marauders and, in Mel Gibson’s blue paint smeared eyes, Hollywood’s idea of a nation’s saviour.    Writer Rob Drummond and composer/lyricist Dave Hook take a different approach in this scaled up hip hop take on Wallace, developed out of its bite size original that first appeared at A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre initiative in 2025. Back then, it was done as a three-way pub debate between a Scotsman, a Wummin and a Sassenach. This time out there are six people in Orla O’Loughlin’s production for the Raw Material company, which takes place on Neil Haynes’ set of steps that looks somewhere between the epic courtroo...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Five stars   When a half buried Winnie asks a barely visible Willie if he still finds her loveable mid way through the first act of Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic study of still lives, it as if they are on a second honeymoon. As Winnie attempts in vain to rekindle lost passions that long gave way to the daily torpor of their routines, Willie can only hide behind a newspaper to barricade himself from her incessant chatter. In her attempts to find some kind of spark, Winnie’s free associating babble flits between everyday mundanities and half remembered moments that defined the way things once were. Unable to spell out her inner yearning, she is literally being buried alive, swamped by the sands of time as the pair go on living apart together.    Siobhán  Redmond captures the full brittleness of Winnie’s desperation as she  comes to life on designer Emma Bailey’s sand hill set in Roxana Silbert’s pitch perfect production. All dressed up in ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   You never met bored teenagers quite like Antigone and Ismene, the two self-mythologising sisters at the centre of Lulu Raczka’s audacious twenty-first century reboot of Sophocles’ Ancient Greek classic. First seen in 2020, Raczka’s reimagining of the original is revived here by director Finn den Hertog in an appropriately bold production that sees Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist bring the two girls to life in devastating and dervish-like fashion.    Stuck in their living room and caught in the crossfire of the epic family fallout turned civil war the play is hinged upon, Loan’s Antigone and Howden Gilchrst’s Ismene play at being wannabe grown ups in a sleepover like scenario. Sex, booze, older men and all the other things they can only pretend about are all on the agenda before they end up doing karaoke instead of actually indulging in such japes.    It is Antigone’s attitude problem that does for them, as she makes out ...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Some stories should never be told. This is made clear by matriarch Marion in Izzy Gray’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s autumn season of lunchtime theatre. Given the Orkney set backdrop of Gray’s drama, one might say secrets revealed here are best left buried at sea.    So it goes with Marion, Elsie and Bess, three of the women left behind in the seaport of Hamvenroe - the ancient Viking name of what is now Stromness - when their men folk disappear for months on end on whaling expeditions. As the trio go on with the daily grind despite the absence, a communal anxiety simmers to the surface. Beyond it, unexplained mysteries on their own doorstep have a seismic effect that erupts into view, only for it to die down once more in a conspiracy of silence, as if nothing ever happened.    There is a brooding fire of unspoken dissent at the heart of Gray’s play, written in a rich Orcadian Scots that in the mouths of the three women...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   When Taylor Swift released her epic 2025 single, The Fate of Ophelia, it possibly did more to introduce the work of William Shakespeare to Swift’s school age audience than an entire term of English Lit classes. One suspects something similar has occurred with the History syllabus over the last decade since Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s poptastic celebration of Henry VIII’s six wives was performed by a bunch of Cambridge undergraduates on the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before conquering the world.    The premise is simple. Each of Henry’s exes who have been magicked together like a manufactured girl band from the grave take it in turns to tell the story of their respective wedded bliss with the king in a bid to prove who was the best queen, divorces, beheading or plain old everyday deaths notwithstanding.    The first of two sextets for this latest tour already look and sound like a stadium-sized headline act in Moss and...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars In every dream home there is heartache for the couple at the centre of Amy Conway’s play, the latest in A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s current season of lunchtime theatre. Henry is almost caught with his pants down when the buzzer goes at the door of his flat, but it’s nothing compared to what happens next.    The woman at the door may look like the spitting image of Henry’s ex girlfriend Liz, but behind the belted raincoat and the hyper efficient persona is the sort of all access dream girl that initially at least seems even better than the real thing. When things don’t go to programme, however, Henry’s actions are a whole lot more extreme than simply pulling the plug. And when the buzzer goes again, reality bites in disturbingly similar ways in the flesh.    The all-encroaching rise of AI is very much on the agenda just now, as it has been long before science fiction became fact. The humanisation and sexualisation of robots too has bee...

Òran Mór, Glasgow Four stars   Life takes two people by surprise in this debut work by LC Stephens for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s latest lunchtime theatre season. Stephens’s play focuses on Clare and Barry, habitués of Glasgow’s West End who find themselves in the same student friendly boozer one night trying to offload their respective baggage to each of their ill suited companions. Through a series of alternating monologues, we discover that both Clare and Barry’s worlds have been turned upside down by very different matters of life and death. We also learn that both parties feel like bit part players in their own story to the point of invisibility. Oh, and as Barry realises, even if Clare doesn’t, they already have history with each other.    There is a lovely sense of everyday mid life longing in Stephens’ script, brought charmingly and wittily to life in Graham McLaren’s elegant production on Gillian Argo’s simple but effective tables and chairs set. This is ide...